Up till now, Windows Phone devices have been the exclusive domain of Qualcomm. Its Snapdragon processors power the lot, but that’s not going to be true with Nokia’s next-generation Windows Phones. The company has finally announced that it’ll be using ST-Ericsson’s NovaThor chips.

NovaThor was officially announced back in February 2011, and in May STMicroelectonics’ Carlo Bozotti let it slip that NovaThor would be used in some of Nokia’s Windows Phone 8 devices. The name is actually a pairing of two ST-Ericsson products, the Nova application processor (currently based on the ARM Coretex A15 and A9 architectures) and Thor modems (which offer support for both HSPA+ and LTE).

ST-Ericsson’s chips should allow Nokia to build some very powerful Windows Phone devices, with maximum clock speeds of the dual-core 32nm Nova A9540 reaching up to 1.8GHz and the 28nm A9600 hitting 2.5GHz. The newest batch of NovaThor chips also sports a beefed-up PowerVR Rogue GPU that reportedly “moves the goalposts” in terms of mobile graphics power and efficiency.

Neither Nokia nor ST-Ericsson have revealed any details about upcoming NovaThor devices, but maybe we’ll see Stephen Elop whip one out at another presentation to his staff. It’ll also be interesting to see if other companies are able to jump the Qualcomm ship now that the NovaThor is known to be powering some Windows Phone devices. But then again, maybe this is one of the many benefits Nokia is going to reap as a result of its landmark deal with Microsoft back in February.